Build A Cloud Automation Service Ready CentOS Template

Update 4/10/19 – Found out that we needed to have Perl as a requirement in the template for vCenter to do its magic.

In previous post (here) I walked through how to build a Ubuntu template that was ready to be use in Cloud Automation Services. In this follow-up post I will walkthrough the process to make a Cloud Automation Service Ready CentOS template. This one is super easy!!

Prerequisites:

Deploying the CentOS Image:

Again, I am going to assume that you have deployed many an OS image via a provided ISO so I am not going to go step through that process. A couple suggestions, but not mandatory, when you go through the initial CentOS build:

Try to use DHCP from the start. It will prevent you from having to change it to DHCP later (if, of course, you’re going to use DHCP which will make life easier)

Make sure to keep auto-updates off. It can cause issues down the road that are a pain to troubleshoot.

Configuring the Image:

The below steps are the important ones when creating a template that will work great with Cloud Assembly.

After going through the initial install, log in as root through SSH (for easy copy and paste).

After you have complete the initial installation of CentOS, you will need to install cloud-init.

yum install -y cloud-init

yum install -y perl (perl is required across the board)

Now that cloud-init is install you need to create a custom network configuration.

THAT’S IT!!! You’re done. Shutdown the VM and convert it to a template.

Using the Content Catalog in Cloud Assembly

Cloud Assembly can use the content catalog as a source for templates as well as using templates that are stored on clusters associated to the vCenters you used for Cloud Accounts. Now that you have your template you can ‘Clone to Library’ to put the template into a content library.